So, today’s been an odd day. Odd because I bought new clothing. The number of occasions I’ve bought actually new clothing in the last few years could be counted, probably, on one hand. Socks & underwear I buy new, shoes I sometimes buy new, but really other than that it’s second hand all around. And I don’t exactly replace my clothing frequently. For example, right this moment I’m still wearing a shirt I bought on my trip to Canada in 2006. It’s a bit faded, but otherwise it’s survived startlingly well.
Anyhow, I’d seen this hoodie whilst I was looking for something for my best beloved for Christmas, and finally bought it today. We picked it up after a nice lunch at Roll for the Soul (who do a fantastic aubergine (eggplant) burger). A quick wander down the street takes you to the surprisingly quirky end of Bristol’s old main shopping area which sports the old Police station, which apparently contains some sort of pop-up-arty-thing that’s never been open when I try and see it, and CoLAB, which is where we got my nice hoodie, and an excellent print by Martha Ford (that is, interestingly, not on her site).
We then bought far too many books/CDs/DVDs at Amnesty, because they were having a £1 sale. Most unfortunate, but much good stuff was obtained. However, in the process I discovered that my iSort database of books was lost in the iOS debacle, and I’ll need to re-upload it. Which is possibly pointless at the moment because it’s not kept track of the many changes to our library (we have got rid of something like 40 books, and err, bought a few replacements). So that’s a job for the future. Anyhow.
Having got home I then spent a cheerful ten minutes closing off (but not quite sealing) the three chimneys in the house that we don’t use. Because it turns out I was wrong. I was looking at the graphs of usage from ovo staggeringly incorrectly. I don’t know how I was looking at them, but yes, it wasn’t right. Yes, our usage in January appears lower than last January, but last year I kept forgetting to submit meter readings, and if you look at our overall usage it’s gone up fairly dramatically.
The car accounts for our increased electricity usage (but costs have actually dropped because it’s all off-peak ‘lecky), but having insulated the house one would expect our gas usage to have dropped. And it hasn’t. So I’ve been around and sealed up the ventilator that I reopened during the redecoration of Kathryn’s office; just with duct-tape over the unpainted metal grille for the moment, I’ll have to come up with a better solution. And I’ve thrown cardboard up over the chimneys and ordered new chimney cowls to go on the two upstairs chimney stacks that we’re unlikely to ever use.
Hopefully that’ll improve the energy usage, as will the tweak to our central heating cutting down the run-time by an hour in the evening. It’s a 5% reduction in ‘time the heating is on*’ which presumably won’t lead to a 5% reduction in price because the house will be ‘a bit colder’ in the morning now, so it’ll take more energy to heat it up. Ugh.
This is why we want to build our own, much more highly spec’d place. Money’s a complete sod, really, isn’t it.
I’ve also been pondering where to live. Whilst I still think we’ll land up in Astoria, OR, this terrifies me. I suppose it’s the whole thing of having had my dad die from cancer, and the years (5, I think) of chemotherapy and hospital stays, and the fact that I’ve had a delightful week in hospital myself, and a trip to the ED with Pyelonephritis, and perhaps just working in the ED. That deep and abiding understanding that it doesn’t matter if you look after yourself, it doesn’t matter if your genes are good (and mine aren’t), shit just happens.
Getting sick just happens.
And that kind of bill, that’s just insanity. It’s sheer bloody madness. How can anyone charge that much for healthcare? How can you charge $816 for an ECG. It takes me maybe 3 minutes to do an ECG, start to finish. A really complex ECG on a patient who’s poorly might occupy one of our senior doctors for 5 minutes, if they decide to debate it with someone else. I can read it well enough to spot most common concerning issues. They’re charging hundreds of dollars for IV fluids. Hundreds. The damn things, last time I checked, cost about 25p.
How the hell does anyone afford that without going bankrupt.
Of course, the UK is running full pelt at becoming some kind of totalitarian state; with the passage of the deregulation bill a likelyhood, and given that we have secret courts in this country…Good god, I can’t believe I’m writing that. We have secret courts in the UK… we have the police being able to access your medical records without your permission, we have the NHS selling your healthcare data improperly anonymised to anyone with the ready money for it, we have privatisation of the highly dubious already ‘nudge unit‘. Gods this is a scary country to be in right now.
So, err, leaving’s definitely still the plan. But anyhow, I’ve been finding the world deeply depressing of late. The rain probably hasn’t helped; the endless pityless rain.
On that cheery note I’m going to go and spend some time measuring up our artwork because I’m wanting to actually hang it up rather and most of it’s unframed…
* I’d like to do the thing where the heating is on all the time, but at a lower temperature overnight, but our thermostat won’t accommodate that.
